Space Pillboxes!

October’s been an insanely busy month, and it is finally (thankfully) slowing down.

My current gaming focus is Infinity, and I’m in love with all of the terrain it requires I get to build! I rolled ideas around in my head ages ago, and decided to work on a military sponsored / protected science research outpost. This was about the time The Martian movie came out, and I’ll be the first to admit it was a heavy influence on my plans.

Of course, I’ve updated my Panoceania color palatte since then, and I noticed that I mismatched the color of the orang-y dirt on the base…

So, I donated the spare pillbox to a local and picked up a second set. They’re cheap enough.

I slowly worked on them when I had downtime between projects, and finally just a week or two ago, I got them done enough to be happy with putting them on a table.

There’s loads of details and even some pieces that aren’t even painted yet, but the airbrushing is done, and the black bits have been blocked in, so they look decent at a distance.

I also painted up a set of Scout Towers for the pillboxes, which lets me connect them together via a bridge, or with the staircase. Warsenal’s built in a nice system that allows these buildings to interconnect in many different ways.

The starcase was very fun to work on. The steps have a small ledge on the ends, which was just asking for some caution stripes. I got to use my adhesive stencils from Fallout Hobbies, and they worked like a charm.

Tip for those of you who use them (and for future me) – when mixing the vinyl stencils with packing tape masks, swap out packing tape with paint on it for clean stuff. The vinyl stencils adheres to the airbrushed paint better than that paint adheres to the tape, so the stencils ended up lifting the paint off the tape, leaving the stencils very not-sticky for the next use. If the tap were clean, the stencils would peel right off cleanly, leaving them ready for re-use.

That’s a small issue, and entirely process related – the stencils did amazingly well:

So, yeah. Loads of details to go, and some odds and ends aren’t even painted yet, but these have color and are playable and I can put them away or use them during games while I work on other projects.

I plan on getting most of the table to this stage or thereabouts before worrying too much about diving deeply on a piece and really polishing it. I’d rather have a painted, playable table than have a beautiful but ultimately useless single building.